With an increasingly competitive domestic market in India, pharma companies are being faced with the challenge of having to work much harder to drive revenue growth. Companies will need to increasingly develop ways to systematically identify unmet customer opportunities and barriers, identify and prioritise specific promotional strategies to take advantage of the opportunities and execute tactics successfully. Having robust sales and marketing capabilities is going to be critical for pharma companies to differentiate themselves in the market. Developing these capabilities will require people with advanced skills, robust and well-defined processes, and enabling tools and techniques.
Given the evolving market dynamics the traditional sales structure, processes and sales reps skills are not enough to succeed today. Companies are starting to explore ways to assess their current sales capabilities, identify and prioritise gap areas, and invest in ways to systematically upgrade themselves in the prioritised areas through a combination of talent management and enabling tools and processes. Strong investments in CRM and reporting technologies to enable the sales force and sales management are good examples of that.